Blood Canticle
Anne Rice
hardcover, 30.95 USD
With fatted tick-like teats filled with sanguine and clotted liquor, Anne Rice has returned to nurse her avid readers with latest offering from her dripping coppery pen. Her heart surging and in proper beat with her natural voice she is writing to her own ear.
This, the latest and purportedly last offering of the Vampire Chronicles, follows the pattern of most of her other works; and longtime Rice readers will have no jarring surprises waiting for them as they turn the leaves. Lestat is the narrator in this outing, and this brings the writers’ perspective and her inner mind’s workings into sharp focus. With the Interview we can only hear about the protagonist second-hand, now we can hear Rice speak in first person through the mask and role of Lestat with a minimum of outside convention. I will fall short of pronouncing this a completely masturbatory work on Rice’s part, but her hand does stray and caress rather heavily in several places. As a last work it falls short of a Gotterdammerung, appearing more like a Life-day Special.
Taken as a work, Blood Canticle is more interesting as a dissection of the writer’s state rather than a tale of a shadowy and velvet world of self-absorbed and angst-filled immortals. Casual murders and teacup tempests of morality, seductions and undead dances are metaphors for what is going on behind the words of this self-compassed potboiler. The narrative appears to be more of an enabling work than a tale spun.
Writers can write for many reasons, as it must stand. You can write for the public, your critics, your friends, yourself, or even your characters. This particular effort seems to be shot through with more of the latter rather than that of the former. At some point in a hot house of dark orchids bound by long rainy afternoons an artist will seize totally on the inner visions and follow them to their turgid rest. It must be a truly liberating feeling to compose your own worlds while in a Berlin bunker or Guiana retreat without those mongrel Allies or fact-finding Senators hovering about.
Do not let Anne Rice’s backlash poison you against the work. It might appear that her blood smeared jowls and bared fangs might have had a little more rabid foam dripping from them than might be erotic or even fashionable, but this matter is clearly something close to her heart. The work is something from Anne Rice, la femme. Most writers get their hackles up when their ego gets savaged, though usually the barbs should be more cutting the higher in one’s craft one achieves before blood gets drawn. Very rarely is a money-back guaranty offered in this day and age, as rare as a woman who writes of sexual predators and obsessive personalities swift to publish where she sleeps.
I should speak to one point though. Anne Rice might wish to find a true editor to work with. I admit that I have not waited with coppery breath for the next installment of the Vampire Chronicles; but I, an admittedly casual reader of her shadow plays, find tangled thickets and sticky copses where there need not be. Were I Anne Rice, this writing would conform to my psyche and brain’s verbal/textual center; but for those not born and perfectly crafted as Anne Rice herself there are understandable disconnects. True editors are loving adversaries that winnow the chaff and render the fat from a finished work. Whatever then is left is put under the harsh glare of the audience and the critics. Neither ensemble cast or virtuoso performance ensures the perfection that is found with the acceptance of those in the darkness or names at the by-line.
Blood Canticle is all right. It is not perfection with neither a word more, less, or ill chosen. It is Anne Rice writing a story that she has shared with her paying customers, backed by a return for money-back offer if not completely satisfied (less shipping and handling I suppose). My copy was handed off to an acquaintance at the gloomy teahouse, and there it will probably remain. In thirty years or so I might stumble upon it in some bargain bin or on eBay. I might reread it to see if it aged any.